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BANQUET YEARS BOOKS

The Banquet Years (1885 to 1915) collared the start of the twentieth century, and featured the birth of modernity in a flurry of art and literary movements.  

It was the golden age of the artist book, a new form of illustrated book where all aspects of the design - typography, decoration, images - were considered of equal importance to the text. Specialist editors of these books commissioned works from the new writers and artists of the day.

So it was that painters from Picasso to Arp, from Dufy to Marcoussis, tried their hands at the creation of woodcut or etched illustrations to the new poetry from Apollinaire to Valéry, from Artaud to Verhaeren. 

This series of books attempts to recreate the great artist books of the past as mimotypes. These are reproductions with English translations, that faithfully keep the original layout and typographical stylings. This can mean recreating a lost font, or picking a colour scheme that reverses the aging of once-bright printer's inks.

These books are based on the Flowerdew Press's extensive collection of artist books, and it is our privilege to share their dazzling qualities with modern Anglophone readers.

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Don't forget to browse the titles and descriptions below!

PRIMO-APRILESQUE ALBUM

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Alphonse Allais

This classic piece of absurdism from the 1890s features a series of monochrome tableaux with deadpan ekphrases. It concludes with a silent funeral march, anticipating John Cage by half a century

THE BESTIARY OR THE CORTEGE OF ORPHEUS

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Guillaume Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire's Bestiary from 1911 was a reinvention of the Western tradition of short illustrated poems with a moral treating animals as emblems. Illustrated by Raoul Dufy, it presents a cavalcade of 30 emblematic animals, introduced by the mythical poet Orpheus. The Flowerdew Press mimotype edition features D.J. Pigott’s rhymed translations that follow the originals as closely as possible, maintaining their light-heartedness as well as their allusive nature

VITAM IMPENDERE AMORI

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Guillaume Apollinaire

Following the end of his relationship with Marie Laurencin Apollinaire made a livre de peintre with his fellow flaneur André Rouveyre of six poems and eight illustrations. The title is a play on the quote from Juvenal - Vitam impendere vero -  to stake one’s life for the truth - but more directly by reference to Rousseau's use of it.
The poems are some of Apollinaire's most symbolist, set in a twilight world of actors, columbines and soldiers in deserted parkland.
The little chapbook has long been folded into anthologies after his Bestiary, where there frail beauty is lost. The Flowerdew Press mimotype restores it to its original form. Rouveyre's illustrations being unavailable for various reasons, eight of Watteau's sketches (so inspirational to Apollinaire) in a matching pose have been substituted.

THE MARITIMES

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Jean Bach-Sisley

A livre de peintre of poetry about the impact of the First World War on the poet, either figuratively or literally. Issued in 1923 as an enclosed set of cards, and illustrated by painter and fashion designer Michel Dubost.

As with the best livres des peintres, the text and images complement each other yet remain separate in a way that seems to oscillate the attention.

TALES IN TWENTY LINES

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Marguerite Burnat-Provins

This artist's book by Marguerite Burnat-Provins is a series of darkly ironic Symbolist prose poems paired with silhouettes cut by hand by the poet and translator Gisèle Vallery. First English translation

THE END OF THE WORLD

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Blaise Cendrars

Blaise Cendrars' "The End of the World as filmed by the Angel N.D." is an artist's book created in collaboration with Fernand Léger. And that is what the book describes: the Angel of Notre Dame shows the demise of the world in time lapse, and then towards the end, describes the angel playing the film in reverse. Leger's Tubist illustrations with their circus poster colours and typographic games complement the strangeness of the prose. First English translation.

THE ALPHABET OF OUR LADY THE VIRGIN

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Max Elskamp

This mimotype features an English translation of a book of woodcut devotionals. 
Max Elskamp apprenticed himself as an adult to learn woodcarving in order to make illustrated books.

TWENTY POEMS TO BE READ ON THE TRAM

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Oliverio Girondo

This volume is a faithful mimotype of the 1922 edition of Oliverio Girondo's Twenty Poems to be read on the Tram, in form and typography as well as the original positioning of the vivid watercolours. The cycle is a set of 20 Candide-like Ultraist postcards recounting Girondo's travels around Europe and South America in the first years of the 1920s, revelling in the splendour and squalor he encountered in equal measure. The ideals of the Ultraist movement - sparsity, vividity, two-image metaphors - are nowhere better seen than in this cycle.

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ALPHABET OF THE GREAT WAR

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André Hellé

André Hellé used his toy story techniques to write his Alphabet of the Great War, explaining the war for the children of the soldiers of France

ALPHABET OF THE GREAT PEACE

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André Hellé

André Hellé used his toy story techniques to write his Alphabet of the Great Peace, using the alphabet to discuss what the peace following war meant for children who may never have known it

THE BOOK OF HOURS

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André Hellé

André Hellé wrote a documentary history of the Great War, possibly as part of a process of understanding it.

EIFFEL TOWER

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Vicente Huidobro

Huidobro shared the modernist love of the Eiffel Tower, and featured it several in his poetry, such as in the finale to Hallali, and in the dedicated painted poem Room 14. With Robert Delauney (with whom he worked on Nord-Sud he wrote this paean to the Tower in 1917. The Flowerdew Press version has as a bonus a fragment of Altazor that the two also made together, set as a painted poem of the Tower.

HALLALI

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Vicente Huidobro

Hallali is Huidobro's great war poem, a Creationist concrete poem talking about the emergence and desolation of the Great War, and the hope for the Great Peace to come.

ROOM 14

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Vicente Huidobro

Vicente Huidobro's unfinished masterpiece of painted poems, the final stage of his journey of exploration of the calligram that he began in Chile with the Summer Japponeries in Santiago in 1912.
The paintings and collages were exhibited at the Edward VII Theatre in Paris in 1922, and an album of pochoir reproductions was promised in the exhibition catalogue. This never eventuated, and many of the painting were lost. There have been a number of partial reconstructions from notes and photographs since the magazine Poemas began investigating them in the 1980s. This imagined edition featured Englished versions of the extant paintings, with colours restored to the original. It also features a reconstruction from notes of Huidobro's lost Eiffel Tower, and proposes thre solutions in homage to the tree lost Rainbow poems. A bonus is the passengers ticket "Tourist Advisory" from Huidobro's Manifesto

SUMMER JAPONNERIES

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Vicente Huidobro

Before he left Santiago for Paris, Huidobro experimented with calligrams, apparently independently of either their European heritage or its revival by Apollinaire. A set of four calligrams was included in Huidobro's his 1912 Songs in the Night, and are here presented as a mimotyped chapbook.

MALAGASY SONGS

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Everiste Parnay

In the eighteenth century Everiste Parnay published a short collection of some loosely translated traditional Hainteny prose songs of the Merina people of Madagascar, from material he had collected while on service in Reunion. This cultural import may have been the birth of the French tradition of the poem in prose. In 1920, an artist book illustrated by Jean Emile Laboureur was commissioned by the Nouvelle Revue Francaise to celebrate the work, only five years before Ravel set three of the songs, and his exotic stylings may well have been influenced by the book's production.

THE MAIDENS

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Georges Rodenbach

​In 1895 in Paris, a pair of Art Nouveau artist friends, Joseph Rippl-Rónai and James Pitcairn-Knowles, collaborated with the publisher Bing to make two of the very first Livres de peintres.
Bing persuaded Geeorge Rodenbach (then at the height of his fame) to write a prose poem for each of them to make a pair of Christmas books. Rodenbach then produced two Symbolism mini-masterpieces. 
The Maidens was created for the colour prints of Rippl-Rónai, and describes the life arcs of a group of young women as they enter society: luscious art nouveau colours in a dreamlike haze are quietly subverted by the gentle pessimism of Rodenbach's prose poem.

TOMBSTONES

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The Tombstones (cover)

Georges Rodenbach

In 1895 in Paris, two Art Nouveau artist friends, Joseph Rippl-Rónai and James Pitcairn-Knowles, collaborated with the publisher Bing to make two of the very first Livres de peintres.

Bing persuaded Geeorge Rodenbach (then at the height of his fame) to write a prose poem for each of them to make a pair of Christmas books.

Rodenbach then produced two Symbolism mini-masterpieces: The Maidens (for the colour prints of Rippl-Rónai) describes the life arcs of a group of young women as they enter society; The Tombstones (for the black and white etchings of Pitcairn-Knowles) ruminates in Symbolist style about three decaying headstones in an abandoned suburban cemetery.

THE LITTLE TOWN

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Remy de Gourmont

Remy de Gourmont wrote a series of prose poems that were vignettes of life in his home town Coutances, which was published by Mercure in 1913. In 1922 it was made into an artist's book with woodcuts by de Gourmont's friend and fellow town-dweller Joseph Quesnel. That edition is mimotyped here in the first English translation

LITTLE OLD ONES

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Emile Verhaeren

Lucien Pissarro believed in the hand-set printed book as a work of art. He designed his own typefaces, and carved lettrines to match. In 1901, he chose Emile Verhaeren's "Les Petits Vieux" for one of the illustrated books poetry and fable he produced at Brook House. Verhaeren's poem tells the story of an old pair of entwined trees that are named "the Little Old Ones" after a beloved couple who had lived nearby. The woodcut he made for the frontispiece, featuring the lovers when they were young, shows how he fused the English Arts and Crafts sensibilities with his neo-Impressionist painting style.

THE PLAGUE

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Emile Verhaeren

The Plague is an artist's book made by the designer Bernard Naudin at Emile Verhaeren's own request. The poem deals with the march of Plague through the Flemish countryside, and the reaction of the people there. The translation was made in the year that COVID-19 impacted the world, and the writing seemed eerily contemporary. The original was written out by hand in Naudin's legendary calligraphy. (Naudin had designed fonts and ornamentations for Deberny & Peignot, and was much in demand as a designer at the time). This book is a mimotyped translation using a typeface created from the original handwriting, with the missing letters needed recreated by reference to Naudin's italic font, Tradition.

JAPANESE IMAGES

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Emile Verhaeren

In 1896 the Belgian Poet Emile Verhaeren was asked by the Tokyo publisher Hasegawa to write poetic glosses for the French version of an album of woodblocks by Kwasson (Kason Suzuki) for the Paris Exposition of 1900. The gentle travelogue verse, a classic of Orientalist dreaming, is translated here for the first time in a mimotyped edition.

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